REST API, ProgrammableWeb and cURL

Jeremy Glassenberg makes an excellent point about the ease of development in REST, and how that’s resulted in immense growth of REST APIs.

We, as developers, should be thinking about the same thing. What happens when you have a REST API for the application you’ve built on Force.com? What new opportunities does that create? For one thing, other people will be able to more easily access *your* data and functionality – they’ll be able to more easily mash up your app with some other app (ProgrammableWeb has a great directory of APIs).

And yes, it’s really easy to use. Once you have an authorisation token (you can use OAuth 2.0 to generate one), using the REST API (Quinton gave a sneak peek in a post a while back) is a doddle. You can even use the venerable cURL command line tool.

For example, you could retrieve the name field from your FooBar object using something like this: